Spotlight / Find / can't find??

HI all, iMac osx 10.7.5 - when I use either Spotlight or command-F (find) it finds a bunch of junk except the one file I KNOW exists on my computer - no matter what search criteria I use "this mac" "all my files" it will not find it 90% of the time. My old G5 and earlier Macs always found the file - - I'm doing something wrong, yes? Thanks -

Depends on where the file is. Spotlight will not find things in the System Library, for example.

Spotlight is not very robust at finding files that may be hidden in sub folders or several levels down. Download and install the free "Find Any File app" from here and use it instead.

An alternative thought is that perhaps you need to rethink your organizational system so that files you need to access aren't so obscurely hidden that you need a find utility to get to them.

This can take several different approaches. I happen to like the "General to specific" folder hierarchy (as an example, my 2009 tax returns are in Documents -> Taxes -> 2009) or for example adding a short name to certain kinds of files so that they turn up quickly in searches (adding -work to work files, for example).

Broadly speaking, everything you might want to create should be easily findable in your Home folder, under either Documents or other media types (folders already provided by Apple) and then in a few sub-folders below that. For example, I have folders in Documents such as Travel, (Creative) Writing, Invoices and so forth. My needs are certainly different from yours, but so far I've only needed to create maybe a dozen broad-category folders (Kids, Medical, Legal -- that sort of thing) and use sub-folders within those broad categories to get more specific. This helps me feel (and has been proven in practice) that I can lay my mouse on any document I want within a very few clicks.

Thanks for the solution!

chscag said:

Spotlight is not very robust at finding files that may be hidden in sub folders or several levels down. Download and install the free "Find Any File app" from here and use it instead.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the Find Any File - it works, greatly appreciate it!